Forty Years of LOGO 162
SoyChemist writes "Forty years ago, LOGO, a derivative of LISP, was born. Several years later, it became the cornerstone of educational software that simultaneously taught geometry and how to think like a coder. With a plethora of high-end educational software packages to choose from, each with flashy multimedia and trademarked characters, parents and teachers may find the humble turtle a bit outdated. Thankfully, several LOGO programs are available for free through a variety of websites, but perhaps 3D programming environments like Alice will be the wave of the future."
lopgo vs python (Score:3, Informative)
Logo was good, but the language landscape is so vast now there are better languages for almost every task to which logo can be put.
Re:lopgo vs python (Score:5, Informative)
In the 80s Logo was about as good as it gets to teach kids some simple computer programming principals. For a lot of kids, Logo was enough to get them to understand that they liked computers. At least back in the day we were trying to teach people how to really use a computer instead of teaching how to talk to Mr. Paperclip into doing your presentation or essay. For teaching kids to program nowdays, Squeek is fairly interesting and there are some neat possibilities with tools like Flash. What matters is showing kids how we program computers to do things step by step and use simple logic to make decisions about the next step. Squeek and Flash let kids do a lot more visual stuff and make it easy to learn how things work.
Re:LOGO vs. BASIC (Score:5, Informative)
Basic is a great learning language, but i can't really think of a better introduction to programming (and geometry!) than Logo. Kids who might have problems dealing with variables, conditionals and even print statements can grasp rather quickly the "move forward, turn, move forward" simplicity of Logo.
I was taught Logo when i was about 10, and like you, i had already cutted my teeth with C64 basic. Still, it was a very fun language to use and i actually learned from it. Something as simple as drawing a n-side polygon involves understanding of angles, distances and basic programming skills.
Logo not just for kids (Score:3, Informative)
I picked up all the 80s books I could find that used Logo to teach geometry, algebra, music, language etc. I'm currently working my way through them. There is of course the Compu Sci series from Berkeley http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html [berkeley.edu] That I'm planning to go through next.
So for those of you who turned your nose up at logo because it's too simple for you may need to turn that statement around. Think Lisp without the parens.
Re:hm, after reviewing 'alice' (Score:2, Informative)
I think it may be easy for people in this community to make assumptions about programming languages and their utility. However, relevant questions, to me, include, "How do we get students who may not have sufficient math skills feel success as programmers at a young age? How do we get them hooked on the idea that computing and programming are accessible in their lives?"
Alice, with its drag-and-drop interface, can be frustrating for some professionals. It is a tool for learning programming concepts with an interface that is friendly to young people by producing a product that is of interest to young people.
It's just another piece in an ever-growing educational toolkit.
Scratch - LOGO in spirit for a new century? (Score:2, Informative)
Alice for the future! (Score:3, Informative)
For kids, Alice has the staying power that Squeek and LOGO don't. It allows them to set up an entire 3D world and tell a story without ever making a single syntax error. They can even make their own interactive games, which is what they really want to do. No hunting for misspellings, no looking up methods or operators in website documentation, no Googling. Just programming, fast and simple. They don't even realize they're programming; they think they're having fun, and they are!
Sure, Alice has a few shortcomings. There's NO DEBUGGER. Polymorphism isn't implemented. Custom methods aren't displayed in the world view. It's hard to produce new models. But on the other hand, it's got my kids thinking like object-oriented programmers, having fun, and producing stuff they love.
I think the submitter nailed it with "Alice will be the wave of the future".
Sounds like unfortunately bad timing (Score:3, Informative)
It seems that Logo was introduced to children a few years younger than that--think grades IV to VI. Computers were introduced into my elementary school around the time frame that computers were introduced into your high school (about 1982). In middle or high school students generally "graduated" to BASIC and perhaps Pascal programming. Older students were also the first to get computers (A small classroom with a number of Commodore PETs and a single "Bell+Howell" branded Apple II+). So, in my school those in Jr High in 1979 to 1982 would've been introduced to computers via BASIC on the PETs and would do a bit of "fun" stuff on the Apple in BASIC as well.
A couple more apples were brought in, then in 1982 Commodore released the 64 and our school bought a large number of them. The Apple II+ and C64s were primarily put into use in elementary grades...and they were each ordered with a copy of LOGO! I was lucky enough to have been in the right grades when they were brought in. LOGO was also ordered for the Apples around that time.
LOGO made for a superior introduction to programming than BASIC for several reasons:
* LOGO took advantage of the graphics and sound capabilities of the machines on which it ran. Without exception ALL dialects of BASIC supplied with personal computers at the time lacked some degree of built-in support for these capabilities and required PEEK, POKE and CALL/SYS/USR commands and machine language skills to fully exploit. Atari BASIC was the best (only lacked support for sprites and a couple of GTIA graphics modes), followed by Apple (no sound support at all, even for the internal beeper, but good graphics), TRS80, and last and very least lousy Commodore BASIC (vanilla MS BASIC without any extensions at all). LOGO could beep, draw pictures and the turtle was always a sprite on machines that supported sprites.
* LOGO syntax was consistent/standard at a high level. I made some fancy programs at home on my Coleco ADAM's SmartLOGO and could type the printout character-for-character into a Commodore 64 and it would run fine! There were visual differences due to differing resolutions and colour palletes (both had 16 colour selections but didn't use the same 16 so it looked tacky on one of the machines). There was absolutely no way to accomplish this level of compatibility with BASIC (beyond the rudimentary MSBASIC standards, so no graphics or sound) with one exception--the Coleco computers' SmartBASIC was syntax-compatible with Applesoft BASIC.
* LOGO was extensible and structured. BASIC was a mess in comparison, with its line numbers and how it enticed beginners into using GOTO. LOGO encouraged structure in its syntax--it had formal, named procedures (TO MYSQUARE/REPEAT 4 [FD 100 RT 90].../END, and you called the procedure as if it were just another built-in "word") and didn't have an enticingly easy-to-use GOTO construct. As a result the code was very readable and students learned good programming practices.
When we "outgrew" LOGO our schools didn't even throw us into old-school BASIC even then; we were put onto IBM XT clones (built by Commodore--like many Canadian schools we had an infatuation with Commodores, probably due to Commodore's Canadian roots) but learned "True Basic" instead of GWBASIC which was more strucutred and "modern" (and interestingly enough, multi-platform as it worked with Macs, etc). In high school QuickBASIC was used on 286 machines.
If it wasn't for me doing BASIC programming on computers at home (and trying my coleco code on the Apples at school) I might never have known basic had line numbers.
Scratch is the new Logo (Score:3, Informative)
Alice - just don't. (Score:1, Informative)
Don't. Teach. With. Alice.
(The preceding has been an announcement by a pissed off CS student.)